Hi everyone. I've been working on a Korg DS-10 Notation for the past few weeks.

What is it? It works like a musical note used by musicians so that they would be able to play a song just by reading those notes. My intention is for us to collaborate and create a "de facto" standard on how to write these "notations" so that we can come up with "our own" notation style without the use of any notes. If you are interested, please click the link below to see more:

Benefits of Notations:
-tutorial based notations could be a good alternative to video tutorials since we can print these notations
-we can have an alternative backup of our songs through these notations.

If I understood well it is for replacing the standard notation? But why? I mean I can read/write standard notation and I find it pretty useful, I don't like other notation like tab-stuff for guitar/bass player and I don't want to have a new notation specially for the ds-10... If you use the standard notation you can play any music and you can share your music with no-korg-ds-10-player.

I think this method works well enough, and either version is fine to read (comma separated takes up less space but line separated might be easier for most). It is certainly helpful for those that aren't musically trained, and converts well to the DS10 interface. Anyway I'm excited about your blog and will be following it closely as I am in the camp of those without musical training but are familiar with the DS10.

to be perfectly honest, this seems to me like an answer that's looking for a question.

consider this: in the time it would take to encode/decode such a notation, you could snap some pictures of the screen with your phone/camera and dump it online. so with that in mind, there's not that much utility to learning a proprietary notation.

also, i believe it takes an equal amount of time to learn standard musical notation, so you might as well learn that instead and then reap the benefits of reading sheet music as well.

one thing that puzzles is me is why the notation only uses relative locations to octave markers. for instance, why doesn't (C3-8) just read as G#3? that way it's less characters and it actually maps to the keyboard letters. My view is that DS-10 users have an opportunity to learn about music for real, and I think knowledge of the key letters is a basic enough concept that all users should be able to understand it. there's no need to hide these details to unnecessarily further musical illiteracy.

Agreed, you don't need to be a pro-solfege-reader/writer to use the korg ds-10 but it won't hurt you to know what note you are playing. And then as bryface said, you can go further in the musical standard notation stuff if you want.

You know I started playing the guitar 15 years ago by reading tab like many many guitar players and then I switched to other instrument (saxophone and piano). And I found that other instrumentalists make funny jokes about guitarists who can't read. And now I know why, because when I pick up my tenor sax and say "ok let's do a blues in B flat just to warm up" to a tab-guitarist I usually heard "well... B flat is the sixth fret isn't it?". If we want (I am pretty sure that everyone on this site does) to make the korg ds-10 a real instrument and be recognized, we have to know a little about music notation. This way, we won't hear some sentences like this "oh man, what is the tonality of your tune? what C3-8, what does it mean? okay I got to figure out by hear, man you should learn your note!"

I have to agree with the above comments. This proprietary notation seems superfluous (ahhh big words...) and holds no real information (even guitar tab specifies fingering and position). You can learn the basics of reading musical notation in minutes; there is no mystery to it and one can quickly see that it makes sense. I've shown many people to read and usually they say "really, that's it? but that's so easy!". I used the word "shown" because "taught" would overstate what it takes to get someone to understand the staff.

On another note however, remember the DS-10 "sheet music" that J8bit's friend made for her (http://ds10forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=327). Now that is a proprietary notation that has some use because it is essentially just a hardcopy visual representation of the DS-10 interface.

I hope all of this critique doesn't get you down or seem too harsh eight9. I just think most people who can read know how simple it is and find other notation efforts overly complicated. Basically in the time you have spent working this out you could have learned the basics of universal notation.

bryface wrote:
consider this: in the time it would take to encode/decode such a notation, you could snap some pictures of the screen with your phone/camera and dump it online. so with that in mind, there's not that much utility to learning a proprietary notation.

I have to say though, if your melody crosses multiple octaves, it's pretty hard to take pictures of. And if you do a lot with other screens (gate, volume, kaoss x/y) then that's even more pictures. So while I think standard notation would be fine for the piano roll, I'm interested to see what could be done with the other screens.

Yeah agreed, I use a patch sheet but there is always some imprecision for the knobs, I am bound to count the number of pixel on each axis if someone can find a solution to "save" and share patch without card save system it will be great!

First and foremost, I am very happy about all the different feedback from everyone. When I first thought about these "notations" I was really at a lost on how to present it in a way that majority would be able to understand how to read them through the methodologies that I was suggesting. And I am very pleased that I posted it here because I was able to see different perspectives from everyone who responded.

Decktonic wrote:Anyway I'm excited about your blog and will be following it closely as I am in the camp of those without musical training but are familiar with the DS10.

This is primarily the main reason why I decided to go for the "tablature like" notations. Being a guitarist who learned to play guitar solos through mimicking the sounds, I never really knew how else to write them down other than through guitar tabs.

bryface wrote:
also, i believe it takes an equal amount of time to learn standard musical notation, so you might as well learn that instead and then reap the benefits of reading sheet music as well.

This made me realize though that writing "notations" for Korg DS-10 is completely different and far easier compared to writing guitar notations because Korg DS-10 resembles a real life "keyboard" with octaves that are clearly visible.

bryface wrote:one thing that puzzles is me is why the notation only uses relative locations to octave markers. for instance, why doesn't (C3-8) just read as G#3?

This is a very nice suggestion, but correct me if Im wrong, I think G#3 means G on the 3rd octave because G "sharp" would not be equivalent to C3-8, is that right? Using this methodology would definitely make the notations much simpler and easier to read.

bryface wrote:My view is that DS-10 users have an opportunity to learn about music for real, and I think knowledge of the key letters is a basic enough concept that all users should be able to understand it. there's no need to hide these details to unnecessarily further musical illiteracy.

When I started this post, my intention was to be able to write notations in a way that people with no knowledge in basic musical notes could understand them. Perhaps, at the back of my mind at that time, was to attract more users (such as myself) to share their musical pieces with the confidence that their notations are accurate even if they are not familiar with the standard notations. In my own perspective, it is more of an "acceptance" issue rather than the notes themselves. That is why I decided to ask everyone here for a de facto standard, so that in a few days time, we, the community, can probably "agree" as to how are we going to make notations when using Korg DS-10. But at this point in time, I think bryface is correct when he said "there's no need to hide these details to unnecessarily further musical illiteracy." Further more, I also agree that

Geolm wrote:If we want (I am pretty sure that everyone on this site does) to make the korg ds-10 a real instrument and be recognized, we have to know a little about music notation.

.

This made me realize further that Korg DS-10 is not a tool for making music, but rather a digital instrument.

Nevertheless, I feel there is still a need to create notations as decktonic said

Decktonic wrote:

bryface wrote:
consider this: in the time it would take to encode/decode such a notation, you could snap some pictures of the screen with your phone/camera and dump it online. so with that in mind, there's not that much utility to learning a proprietary notation.

I have to say though, if your melody crosses multiple octaves, it's pretty hard to take pictures of. And if you do a lot with other screens (gate, volume, kaoss x/y) then that's even more pictures. So while I think standard notation would be fine for the piano roll, I'm interested to see what could be done with the other screens.

tl;dr taking pictures is a bitch and the quality sucks.

which is true.

Syscrusher wrote:On another note however, remember the DS-10 "sheet music" that J8bit's friend made for her (http://ds10forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=327). Now that is a proprietary notation that has some use because it is essentially just a hardcopy visual representation of the DS-10 interface.

I hope all of this critique doesn't get you down or seem too harsh eight9. I just think most people who can read know how simple it is and find other notation efforts overly complicated. Basically in the time you have spent working this out you could have learned the basics of universal notation.

The bottom line: I am convinced to use the standard musical notes rather than tab-like presentations because of the following reasons:
-other musicians who dont have a Korg DS-10 can also play our tunes using other instruments (guitar, piano, sax, etc.)
-the community (myself included) will have the chance to learn how to read (simple)standard notations

Nevertheless, I still need everyone's opinion on how to present these notations. bryface has a suggestion as i mentioned above, but there are factors that we have to consider:

1. how do we represent the steps together with the notes?
2. how do we represent the dead notes?

my suggestion is this, to play "do-re-dead note-mi" (C-D-X-E) on the 3rd octave for the 1st 4 steps for example, would be:

version 1: horizontal approach
1(C3),2(D3),3X,4(E3)

version 2: vertical approach
1(C3)
2(D3)
3X
4(E3)

version 3: horizontal with no more steps approach
C3,D3,X,E3

if you have other suggestions, kindly post it here so we can arrive at a solution, and perhaps make a new section for posting musical notations in our website

How would you approach sharps and flats? What about keys other than C major? For instance 1(C3),2(D3),3X,4(E3) does not transpose relatively to 1(E3),2(F3),3X,4(G3)- meaning the melody is not the same in both instances. What about notes that are sustained or played legato?

May I suggest a more visual approach? How about an x/y representation (much like the DS-10 step sequencer) where the vertical axis represents pitch and horizontal represents time. The length of a particular note could be represented by related symbols and these symbols could be placed on the vertical axis to specify pitch. A "dead note" would have a corresponding symbol. To keep things clear, simple and compact the vertical axis would only represent natural notes and not the full 12 notes of the octave (this is what make the step sequencer a little awkward as barely and octave fits on the screen). If a sharp or flat is needed an appropriate symbol for each could be placed in front of the note that needs to be shifted.

For instance, the average pattern length is 16 steps so a symbol will be needed for the minimum to maximum note lengths available within the pattern. Fig 1. below represents some symbols that may be appropriate for this task:

Note Durations.jpg (6.58 KiB) Viewed 2602 times

The symbol to the far left represents a note that lasts an entire (whole) 16 step pattern. The symbol to the far right is the smallest step available- one sixteenth. Therefore the eighth note is two 16ths long, the quarter is four 16ths and the half is eight 16ths.

(OK you're probably on to me now - I do this light heartedly and not to be facetious)

Here is the x/y grid to be used:

grandstaff.jpg (7.43 KiB) Viewed 2602 times

The central whole note labeled "Middle C" is universally known as C4. The space above it is D4. The bottom line of the Treble Clef is E4. The next space is F4. The notes progress alphabetically upward like so:

Treble Clef.jpg (12.41 KiB) Viewed 2602 times

Thus a simple melody such as Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" could be represented like this:

ode-to-joy.gif (4 KiB) Viewed 2602 times

The vertical lines (bar lines) delineate patterns (bars or measures). This melody is eight patterns long. Of course the smallest value in this melody is a quarter note so all the quarters could be made into sixteenths and the halves into eighths and only two patterns need be used (so long as no smaller divisions will be needed later).

If "dead notes" (rests) need to be notated here is the equivalence chart:

DS-10 Dominator wrote:BTW I say photos, you simply want to keep it as less "coded" as possible for beginners.

Yes and graphical representations like J8bit's DS-10 sheet.
Honestly, with the way synthesizers react to very small changes in parameters there is a limit to what standard musical notation can express when it comes to representations of electronic music (people have used symbols for filter sweeps etc though...).

Syscrusher wrote:How would you approach sharps and flats? What about keys other than C major? For instance 1(C3),2(D3),3X,4(E3) does not transpose relatively to 1(E3),2(F3),3X,4(G3)- meaning the melody is not the same in both instances. What about notes that are sustained or played legato?

For the sharps and flats, I am suggesting that the # and b symbols be used:

ex.

1(C#3),2(Db3), etc.

I really appreciate your effort on the presentation of the notes, but as much as I tried to understand it, I am having a hard time. No offense, but I really prefer the simpler notations wherein I could plot the melodies without much effort on figuring out which is which. But yeah, I will use the proper note values (C-D-E-F-G-A-B), its just that the standard symbolic representation just don't work for me at this point.

As for the legatos, I agree that you cannot represent them using the notations that I am suggesting but i believe it is easily workable once the "melodic" notations have been properly addressed.

After plotting the notes, we can go to Song Mode and plot the sequence from Pattern 1,2,3 & 4. If done properly, the notes closely resemble the original work of LPChip. I am not saying that this is the right way he did it but it sounds identical to it IMO. If we would observe closely, LPChip used a BPM lower than 90 (i think its at 45 but im not sure, and I dont know the number of steps that he used), and he used 2 patterns only whereas I used 4 patterns for the entire intro progression. Nevertheless, the methodology works even without the need of any pictures. And it *somehow* improves musical illiteracy because of the CDEFGAB representations.

Some might argue that there are *actual* chords that is equivalent to proposed notations such as C5, which would conflict with the entire music theory of chords, but then again, in the world of Korg DS-10, we can only render (or should I say cheat) the software to produce a chord that we want (if that is even possible without the need of overdubs or dual mode and the likes), but in actuality, there are only melodies which is generated step by step.

i hope you guys would give this a try. and if it is not too much to ask, maybe someone could create a real musical sheet version as a counterpart of the notations that I made using real notes so that *maybe* those who cant read notes, such as myself, can learn more from it too .

DS-10 Dominator wrote:If you literally want to copy someone else's song why not use screenshots or extracted saves?

Decktonic wrote:taking pictures is a bitch and the quality sucks.

I agreee with decktonic on this matter. and aside from that, taking the example that I made, if i wasnt the original composer of the song, how will i be able to take picture of it or extract saves? i guess one of the benefits of notation is that, IMO, if there is someone who would like to know how another person plays a particular song (such as Walking by LPChip), another person could transcribe it for him voluntarily. it can either be the original composer (which is highly desirable), or another transcriber. another good thing about notations is, you can make mix (or should i say Korg DS-10 versions) versions of existing songs such as my first post here, Cowboys from Hell, Korg DS-10 version.

I do have some things to add in this discussion that hasn't been mentioned before.

First of all, lets compare this to an original notation, like sheet music. Sheet music is being used to notate the notes so it can be easily read in a flow and performed like that by real people using real instruments. When you look at sheet music, you might find that it says: instrument: piano, but more than that, you'll not really find other than the notes itself and perhaps the title of the song.

This leads me to the conclusion that the notation should be as easy as possible. The more complex a notation looks like, the harder it will be to follow and probably the harder it will be to write it down.

Since the Korg DS-10 has a C written on the keyboard with the octave number (C3, C4, C5, etc) I would use a tracker style notation: C-3, F#5, etc...

Since a song on the Korg DS-10 offers so much more than just the leads, there becomes the question, how much of the other stuff do you want to notate?

Normal notations wouldn't notate those at all, so you would only focus on the lead(s) and perhaps the key it is being written in.

Since note can take longer, I think it would work best to make longer notes either notate as: C-3+C-3+C-3 or C+3 (3x)

A pause could be ---

I also would not write it pattern based, but song based. So if a pattern is repeated, write the pattern again.

Notation also gives the chord in which a melody is being played, you could add this information too.

Because of this information, you can now even play it in your own style. If you want the original, just share it. If you want the essential part of the music, I would aim for something like this. (the notes I gave here are actually what I originally wanted to have in the song. The minor and major G however are not auditable in the song itself because I don't actually use the note that would make this clear in the rhythm section.

EDIT: Changed chordprogression from Cmaj7 to C7. Thanks for pointing it out, Syscrusher.

Last edited by LPChip on Thu Oct 14, 2010 2:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.